This book is a collection of ten essays written by academics about how ten Cold War statesmen thought about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. The statesman include Harry Truman, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill, and Charles de Gaulle. The book explores the question of whether nuclear weapons revolutionized foreign policy and led to an abandonment of war out of dread of the consequences of nuclear war, or whether such weapons are mostly irrelevant to the current absence of war among the great powers. The authors answer that question by examining how those with the power to make war in the nuclear age thought about war. John Gaddis and John Mueller give differing concluding essays at the end of the book.